


skin to skin, set us off

by ninemoons42



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Implied/Referenced Terrorism, Mission Related, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, RebelCaptain May the Fourth Exchange, Rogue One - some of them live, Undercover, and condemned only by the empire, bombing mission, is it really terrorism if it is sanctioned by the populace, it is a very flimsy excuse of a plot, rebelcaptain may 4 exchange
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-03
Updated: 2017-05-03
Packaged: 2018-10-27 02:01:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,969
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10799367
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: Night after night, the lights go dark with the sunset: and this is because to turn the lights on is to concede to the Empire.And just to make sure that that doesn’t happen, Jyn Erso spends her days destroying Imperial power and supply lines, with the full cooperation of the elders of this place.So it’s been another one of those days of planting extremely powerful explosives, and she heads back to her assigned quarters in the gathering dark and heat, only to find that there is someone there, someone waiting for her, someone she wants.





	skin to skin, set us off

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Tiara_of_Sapphires](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tiara_of_Sapphires/gifts).



> This is my gift to Tiara_of_Sapphires, for the Rebelcaptain May the Fourth Exchange! 
> 
> Prompts: the power goes out on a Rebel Alliance installation // the post-mission high

The lights are going out around her: darkness falling around her, not entirely a friend and not entirely an enemy, and she’s been on the ground on Stewjon for some time now, but she still wants to hunch into something protective: a spacer’s tunic and a proper pair of trousers, and a jacket with too many pockets, because she’s lived all her life on the run and the only thing that’s ever been different is the stuff she finds in those pockets after another hour, another day, another life on the run.

No pockets for her today, and no sleeves either: and that’s a relief and an annoyance all at once. A bustling mid-sized city on a terrestrial Mid-Rim planet. A familiar mix of beings and languages and hardware from all over the galaxy. 

What is unfamiliar about this place is the amount of bare skin on display: bare arms, bare legs, bare necks. A few enterprising beings aren’t wearing shirts or tunics at all, while others have opted to wear nothing on their feet, despite the heat rising in numbing waves from underfoot. 

Even more unfamiliar is that all of that bare skin has nothing to do with sexual allure or mating displays. 

Jyn takes in another breath of humid superheated chemical-bogged air, and doesn’t flinch away at the smell of some just-out-of-sight midden heap, and clenches her hands reflexively into fists.

The stones in the road vanish mostly out of her sight: every day, as the sun sets and the evening begins its long slow transition into the true night, the lights go out without fail, and the reason for that lies just up ahead -- if she listens closely, if she stops on the right street corner, if she waits for the wind to blow in the right direction and then leans in to catch it --

There. She hears it now.

Soft wafting push and pull and flow of waves beating at the shore.

Even as she hears the waves, she thinks of the lake: deep and still and murky green. Thinks of the portions of the shore that are covered with fine black sand, polished and soft and tinged with subtle colors -- and of the portions that are nothing but jagged green-veined rocks thrusting their edges every which way.

And the lake’s waters wash the black sands and the green rocks, rippling in the occasional hint of too-warm wind.

It’s important to the people of this world that this lake of human-body-heat waters remain serene and almost silent, with its wavelets the only motion.

Were the lake transformed into a churning pool, into relentless foam and roar, then that would mean only one thing: that the lake had been turned into a vital thrumming source of constant energy, that could be harnessed to power all manner of machinery and generators. 

And the lights would stay on all night, and there would be proper ventilation, and the littles running everywhere would stay in school and chant their history.

All of those are good things. She’s heard the wishes in everyday conversation; she’s suffered her own fair share of curt conversations brought on by too much heat and too little sleep.

But if the lights were turned on and the ventilation were running, then the Imperials already lurking on the outskirts of this settlement would be capable of establishing an actual outpost of some kind -- an outpost that could so easily turn into a garrison, what with a lake to keep its machines of war going.

And like so, so many of the worlds scattered across the galaxy, this very settlement still burns with fear and a cankering resentment for white armor and lock-step marching and an oppressive understanding of order. 

Perhaps more so than most, if the name that the elders and the littles alike invoke in their daily prayers is any sort of indication.

So the children play their last games in the deepening evening, darting and laughing and calling to each other to go home.

Now Jyn feels her way back down an almost-familiar road, heading back for the night, and in her wake: the elders of this world. The conference and its attendant ceremonies have been going on for two weeks now, as she understands it. There are too many matters to iron out, city to town to village to hamlet, and just about the only thing that the dozens of wizened old ones can agree on is the necessity of the dark nights.

The first question she’d asked during her briefing for this mission: how long is the conference expected to take? And no one she had spoken to -- not the beings in Command, not the odd pilot or soldier who had been born or raised in this sector, not Baze and Chirrut who had spent three years on Stewjon on orders from their temple -- had been able to provide her with a satisfactory answer.

Perhaps it will be a long conference, and perhaps it will be a short one: either way, she knows what she has to do, and she knows what her task here is.

And the satchel slung into the small of her back is much lighter now compared to when she’d set out just after the punishing midday. Her hands smell of lake water and a soft leaf that could be rubbed into sweet-smelling foam, nicely effacing the stink of the extremely potent explosives that she’d used to bring down another attempt at constructing a hydropower station next to the farther shore of the lake.

It isn’t even the first time she’s bombed the Imperials here: and she’s willing to keep on doing it and doing it, until the Imperials give up or she runs out of explosives -- and then it would only be a matter of waiting for fresh supplies, and she would return to her duties of destruction.

The thought of being actually _required_ to bomb the Imperials in this place makes her attempt to smile now, as it has nearly every day of her stay here.

And once again she thinks she would have the energy to laugh, if only it weren’t so warm.

She needs water, she needs a bath, and she needs to get out of the mind-numbing heat.

So she fumbles her way through the door into the tiny apartment she’s taken here: and in that moment of standing on the threshold, in that moment of being caught between this world that is only a little less stranger for her having been here for more than just a few nights, and this apartment that isn’t hers though it bears the traces of her living here, she thinks her mind might just be playing tricks on her once again.

Is this the actual apartment she’s been staying in? No way of knowing for sure, not without the lights, and so: she gropes in the semidarkness until her hand falls onto a weathered-smooth surface, until her fingertips bump against something metallic, that seems almost warmer than her breath and her skin and the world around her.

Next to that metallic shape, an open box, half-full now, and she’s been to other places where fire was a decoration, where fire was controlled and harnessed -- and stars above, she works with fire herself, what with the blowing up of things and all -- and she still feels compelled to wince and be too careful, when she strikes a match.

Scratch-scratch and a flame springs to life, accompanied by smoke and the acrid scent of the chemicals she’s setting alight.

Steady, steady, she holds the match steady and the flame flickers, settles, and she touches its bright flare to the wick that she can see, half-submerged now in the shallow square tin made of intricately pierced metal: the candle that takes the shape of the interiors of that tin sputters and yields light, reluctant at first, and then growing just a little brighter.

Now she can see.

Now she knows that this is her quarters.

She walks a careful circuit around the perimeter of the first room, only a matter of a dozen or so steps, and as she walks she lights the rest of the candles that are distributed onto the narrow counters and low-slung shelves, and as she walks she keeps listening carefully: over and above the sigh of the lake, she is intent on the steady high drone of the scanner clipped to her belt.

If that drone changes in pitch, she’ll have to run: and so far she hasn’t had to yet.

Still, she’s on her toes.

The first circuit done, she ducks through a set of beaded curtains, each rough-hewn shape streaked with copper and black -- and she does so carefully, because it only takes one step before she collides with her bed: a heap of cushions stacked onto a narrow box that squats low to the ground. The cushions are dented and darned and patched, and they are covered in a thin open-weave sheet, and she’s spent her nights on them, tossing and turning and cursing the heat. 

She walks the few steps around the bed, and the scanner’s high song never falters or fails or changes.

And so she is safe for now.

Though the heat makes her drag her steps, makes her need to stop moving, she doesn’t give in: she flits. She walks around the rooms again and again. 

Sweat trickling down the back of her neck. She is too aware of its crawl and its heat.

In its tin, the first candle she’d lit suddenly gutters out as she recrosses the curtain, overwhelmed in the movement of the pooling wax that washes out its low-burning flame. 

No matter: she can see the rest of the apartment. The other candles waver, and keep giving off light.

Last but not the least, she peels off her sodden shirt and skirts. Lights the lantern set on the ground next to her bed, a battered shape in squared-off twigs and the same material as the sheet on her bed. 

Hard to sit, hard to focus, though she needs to do those things: she needs to write a report. 

She would never have guessed that someone like Princess Leia Organa, one of the bare handful of survivors of martyred Alderaan, would worry -- much less about someone like herself.

“I expect more than progress: I expect to know that you continue to survive. That you are still among the living. I would not take it well were I to find your name on a list of the dead -- though I imagine I would not be the first to mourn.”

“Why?” Jyn remembers the Mon Cal capital ship on which she’d received her mission briefing, and remembers making her way down a corridor in response to a summons, only to find herself staring at the odd sight of Leia sitting next to a nosegay of wilted white petals and fading purple-veined leaves. Remembers the two women who had been hunched over datapads, and the subdued light of the room that fell onto their intricate hairstyles: the white-haired one, Leia’s aide and shadow and witness, who had introduced herself as Winter; and the golden-haired one, the only other pilot Leia trusted with her life aside from Skywalker, Solo, and Antilles, who was named Evaan. “You don’t have to care about me.”

“But you fight,” Leia had said. “And because you fight, we take heart from your example.”

“You can’t possibly think that I’m some kind of paragon. Some kind of -- being to look up to. I am not that,” Jyn had warned.

And Evaan had snorted inelegantly. “What makes you think that any of us here are?”

It’s too hot to concentrate.

The report will have to wait until tomorrow.

Jyn still remembers, in the here and now, the emblem that all three had worn on their sleeves: a three-lobed shape that bore a valley-shaped diagonal indent down its center.

Now that she knows about that emblem -- it’s a representation of the chalcedony star, one of the most ancient and revered symbols of lost Alderaan -- she thinks she might be seeing more and more of it in the galaxy at large. Even some of the elders of Stewjon had been wearing it, emblazoned upon their robes, and that’s with the danger of the Imperial presence, the origin of the symbol, and what it was now understood to mean.

Jyn thinks of running from all manner of explosions, from all manner of firefights -- and she thinks of the subtle resistance of wearing an Alderaanian symbol where Imperials can see it, and wonders if she might be brave enough to sew the chalcedony star into her own clothes.

Recklessly, she reaches for the sewing kit that Bodhi had pressed into her hands. 

“You already have your first-aid supplies,” he’d explained, standing just outside the cargo bay of the freighter that was to be her mode of transportation. “You have ammunition, and tools, and the other things you need.”

“You think that I need this,” she’d said.

“Most beings will understand going around in mended clothes,” he’d said.

She’s glad for its presence now, despite her own clumsiness when it comes to stitching -- glad for his thoughtfulness and the way he worries for her.

Glad he’s given her another means of continuing the fight against the Empire.

Here is the needle and here are a few lengths of thread, all different dull colors except for the white, and there is nothing at all similar between bombing a hydropower installation and sewing lines into her skirts. One is flashy and noisy, and the other is discreet and decorative, and they are both acts of resistance.

She can endure the heat long enough to keep fighting, at least in the sense of clumsy embroidery and sweat pooling in the creases of her elbows.

Crooked white lines taking shape in the loose drape of the skirt that she’ll wear in the morning. 

She jabs herself with the needle several times, and can’t muster the strength to swear.

The chalcedony star that she sews into the cloth is lopsided when she’s done with it: and that is the second task she’s succeeded at today. A small victory on top of the larger one. It’s enough, she thinks; it calls for an actual shower underneath flowing water. It calls for washing the sweat out of her hair. It calls for water rushing down the back of her neck: and it is the movement of the water that is soothing, because there is nothing cool about this water, and she would have been happy for a draft of cold air, for a chill creeping down her nerves -- 

Over and above the water splashing around her -- over and above the constant sigh of the waves on the lake -- over and above her own heat-belabored breaths -- an echo of something new, suddenly, moving in her quarters. A footstep, perhaps, or the sound of a weapon being drawn.

Though she likes to fight with the truncheons that she carries on practically her every mission, she’s not dependent on them: and so now she feels her nerves coming alight as she hurriedly wraps another thin sheet around her body and lunges out, fist already cocked and surging forward to strike -- 

She hits a hand, palm out and braced, and she growls and yanks her arm back, winding up again -- 

“Jyn.”

Her name.

Low and calming and not at all urgent.

The flickering candlelight seems to linger on the face of someone she knows, and she squints, tries to make sure she’s not looking at a mirage -- 

“Cassian?”

His mouth twitches, and he nods, once. “Yes. It’s me.”

She steps away from him. Crosses her arms over her chest. “Last I heard you were in deep cover.”

“I needed to be in deep cover. There’s a death-mark on my head on Coruscant.”

As there is one on hers there, and on several other worlds.

“What were you doing there?” Just as quickly as she’d asked the question, she takes it back. “No, no, I don’t want to know, forget I asked. Just, mission complete?”

He nods again. “Mission success.”

“I -- and how did you know I was here?”

“Winter.” She watches him cross to the window, watches him lean against the wall. Watches him swipe at his temples, the movements jerky and rough. “As soon as I let Command know that I was on my way back, she commed me. She thought you were about due for some fresh supplies.”

“I was going to send a holo in the morning,” she says.

“I brought you explosives.”

The words freeze her in place where she’s pulling fresh clothes from her packs, and the laugh escapes her in a surprised huff. “That’s exactly what I needed,” she says, and she ducks back into the ’fresher to do up the laces on her tunic, knee-length and sleeveless. 

“Do you have any more of those?” 

She blinks at him. “What?”

“Your clothes.” He motions at himself. “I’m -- now I understand I’m overdressed for this place.”

“It’s too damn hot,” she agrees, and throws another tunic at him.

While he’s in the ’fresher she hunts through the cupboards for something he can drink from -- and she remembers to pour herself three glasses of lukewarm water, tasteless going down her throat, and vitally necessary.

“Water,” she says, when she hears his step once again. 

“Thanks,” and his voice is moving towards her.

And now he’s standing next to her at the sink.

Water glistening in his hairline, droplets trickling down his cheeks, beads catching on his stubble.

She swallows and offers him the same glass she’d been drinking from. “I don’t have anything else.”

“It’s all right,” and she watches him bend to the tap, one hand cupped to direct the water.

She watches the movement of his throat as he swallows again and again, and closes her eyes. 

The rooms have gotten warmer again, she thinks.

His fault.

Some distant part of her mind tells her that this is not how she’d imagined seeing him again, talking to him again, after the missions that have separated them for the better part of four months -- perhaps even five? It’s entirely possible she’s lost count. 

Splash, and a quiet curse.

She opens her eyes to water spreading down the front of Cassian’s tunic.

The material is thin, and now the spilled water has turned it nearly transparent. Has left it clinging to his skin.

She thinks he might be trying to apologize -- but the moment she drags her eyes back up to his face, he goes quiet. 

What he sees in her face she can only guess, but he must understand -- because he’s moving, he’s crossing the tiny distance to her, and she lets herself be carried along -- that’s his hand curved around the back of her head, protecting her even as he walks her right into the sliver of wall next to her bed.

He is hemming her in on all sides. He is radiating heat that should suffocate her. He is so close, and still so far away -- she grabs his wet tunic in her fists and hauls him down -- the impact of the kiss rattles down her nerves like the scrape of a match that sparks a flame -- 

Some kisses are gentle, and some are sweet -- and right now she has no patience for those kisses. Right now, she wants savage and hungry, and the sound that rises from somewhere inside Cassian’s chest is a rough snarl, and in response she bites at his mouth, once, and again -- not enough to draw blood, he’s not into that, but enough that he hisses and returns the favor, the impact of him as shattering as the shockwave of a bomb going off -- 

She needs to kiss him, needs the taste of him lingering on her tongue, and she hears herself whine encouragement, and in response he sweeps his tongue along the roof of her mouth, along the edges of her teeth -- 

And then he’s pulling away.

She stares into his eyes, into his blown pupils, the image of herself in his eyes flickering by lantern-light.

He’s speaking to her: “No need to rush.”

“They’ll be looking for you soon enough,” is her response. 

“They” -- as in the Rebellion, as in the Empire, as in everyone else in this kriffing galaxy. 

Something very like a smile shivers on his mouth for just a moment. “Not this time.”

She shakes her head in disbelief. 

“Let me convince you.”

“Cassian,” she growls.

“Jyn,” he answers, and he only sounds mild: the heat in his eyes should have consumed her whole, should have reduced her to ash, and she wants it, she wants him, she wants all of him -- 

“Please,” she hears herself say. Hears herself plead.

“Whatever you want, mi corazón. Whatever you want, I promise. Just -- let’s take it slow.”

She can feel his hands where they are now on her hips, trembling, perhaps in anticipation. Perhaps he can feel the need that burns desperately down her every nerve, that sparks a vicious cramp in her midsection, that makes her press her thighs together -- that makes her want to wrap her legs around him -- 

“Jyn.” Her name, again, falling from his lips -- she’ll never understand why he sounds so reverent -- all she understands is the heat of his kiss, and she pulls him close, so close, he’s all over her, he’s all she can sense --

Again he pulls away from the kiss and she sighs.

Down, down: his lips and his tongue drawing lines of heat from her chin to the hollow of her throat. His hot breath on her skin. He must be speaking to her but she doesn’t understand the language or languages. She’s too focused on him, too distracted by his hands: he’s pulling her clothes away and soon she’s completely bared to him, completely at his mercy.

It’s all she can do not to shout his name when he deliberately scrapes his stubbled cheek down her chest, toward the hollow between her breasts, and she does groan when he follows that up with kisses, down and out to sweep along the underside of one breast and then the other. 

With every breath she takes she drowns in the sensations of him, again and again: and it’s a relief, sort of, when he takes one nipple into his mouth. Rolls it onto his tongue, sending waves of scorching need through her, whispering wicked encouragement to her and then he goes almost silent: almost. The words are gone and in their place all she can hear is the sounds of him suckling, soft and focused and she feels her breath leave her in a low yearning cry.

“So sweet,” he whispers, just before he lavishes her other nipple with the same intense attention, and all she can do in response is clutch at his hair with the hand that she’s not using to steady herself against the wall, and the pleased rumble of his answering groan steals her breath away again.

That must be her voice pleading with him, though the only word she can actually make out is his name -- and finally he must take pity on her, because he’s releasing her, because he’s moving away from her, and she blinks in a daze, because there’s something scraping along beside her and -- 

The lantern. Cassian’s hand on the lantern, pulling it closer so she can feel the heat of it next to her foot. 

“What are you doing,” she asks, and the first time she says it her voice cracks with dizzy lust, so she says it again.

“I want to see you,” is his response.

His other hand skims down her leg, down to her ankle -- which he holds, gently, and lifts from the floor, and she has to fight for her balance for a moment, and when she stops moving, one of her legs is hooked over Cassian’s shoulder. 

She looks at him on his knees, looking at -- at her cunt. 

And there’s a wicked sort of mischief in his smile, now.

Just the realization makes her understand the heaviness in her nerves, the slick sensation already spreading down her thighs.

“So good for me, aren’t you,” she hears Cassian say, marveling again, and she can’t look away -- not when he’s closing his eyes, not when he’s leaning towards her, and she shivers when he makes contact, the tip of his nose brushing the springy curls of her and then just a little closer, pressing in --

All she can do is draw in a sharp breath, loud in the heated silence, when he licks at her cunt, long lingering deliberate swipe, going up and then he’s drawing tiny tight circles around the nub of her -- he’s rocking her onto him, onto his mouth -- 

Every nerve on fire for him. Every part of her focused on him. Every breath shattered by him.

Maybe he knows her so well by now that he can feel exactly how she’s spiraling out of control for him, spinning free from her senses as she’s thrown inexorably towards orgasm -- and he’s right there to push her over that edge, fingers and mouth working on her now, until she breaks with a sobbing cry, almost his name but not quite.

Coming back to her senses to find herself on her knees and Cassian wrapped around her -- to the unmistakable hardness of him, hot even through the tunic that he’s still wearing, pressing insistently into her hip.

“You,” she begins, and then gives up on the words. Pulls him in for a bruising kiss. 

Tries to make up her mind.

This time she pulls away, to the dazed pleasure marking his face, and she asks, very quietly, “You’ll be here later? You’ll be here tomorrow?”

Somehow he understands what she’s trying to say. “I’m not here for a hit-and-fade, Jyn, and I’m not leaving you any time soon. I’m here with you. I -- I’m the backup, not that you needed it, but they sent me to you anyway.”

And it’s enough, it’s what she’s got, and she’ll take it -- so she places her hand on his shoulder, and pushes him against the wall, forces him to sit on the floor. “Let me.”

“Jyn -- ”

“Whatever I wanted, you said,” she says, leaning in to whisper against his mouth. “This is what I want.” 

She brushes her fingers against his cock and she’s watching him take a sudden shocked breath. 

“Let me,” she says, again.

And he nods, dumbstruck and gratified.

So she climbs into his lap and kisses him, framing his face with her hands -- burning the warmth of him and the feel of him, the sweat-slicked shape of him, into her nerves, into her mind. She nibbles at the corners of his mouth, at the curve of his smile, and when she pulls away from him she traces his groan with her fingers.

The same fingers that she pulls down his body, skimming over the planes of his chest, the muscles and the scars, down over the flutter in his belly and then lower still.

She knows the heft and the heat of his cock, the way it fills her hand. He’s slick at the tip already, and she smoothes her thumb over his slit, spreading that slickness around, relishing the punched-out sound that escapes him --

Only for a moment, and then she’s licking her lips, and she’s bending to him, she’s leaning down, tracing the shape of her own mouth with him -- 

“Jyn, please -- ”

She relishes the heat of him in her mouth, the bitter-salty taste of him, and the quiver that runs through his thighs as she takes him in deeper and deeper -- till she’s so full that all she can do is swallow around him, and even that is enough to make him grit out an obscenity, something guttural and unintelligible.

She begins to move, then, bobbing up and down and her hand pumping him all the while, and she spares a moment’s attention to look at the lust on his face, stamped onto his open mouth, and she can feel herself getting wet again, and she can hold out a little longer -- 

When he says her name again, it’s a warning.

Just the signal she’d been waiting for -- and she pulls away swiftly, hears him gasp, thwarted -- but not for long. Still holding him in place, she swings her knee over his spread legs and then she’s guiding him into her, all of him filling her up in one easy stroke.

“Wicked woman,” he chokes out.

“Yes.”

She holds his eyes for a long moment -- long enough that she can feel the heat rising from his skin, and from hers -- the heat from the lantern pales in comparison -- 

“Move,” she whispers.

“Yes.” 

She moans as he drives into her, and before long she’s grinding helplessly onto him, as well, the two of them somehow in sync despite the wild frantic beat of her heart, despite the gasping irregular breaths falling from his mouth, and she closes her eyes and gives herself over to the mindless shock of him, to the pleasure that sears every inch of her skin.

“Jyn, come for me,” and the words are already shattering around the edges even as she hears them, as she breaks once again, waves upon waves of pleasure battering at her, and just enough awareness to hear him shout incoherently -- just enough to feel him coming -- 

She opens her eyes to the sweat beading in his hairline, and laughs softly, spent and overheated -- and she tightens her arms around him. Feels him stroke his fingers down the damp skin of her back. She can almost ignore the hammering heat.

Almost.

**Author's Note:**

> Super thanks to [@therebelcaptainnetwork](http://therebelcaptainnetwork.tumblr.com/) for putting this fic exchange together!
> 
> And come talk to me about rebelcaptain and Rogue One (and Star Wars too!) on tumblr -- [@ninemoons42](http://ninemoons42.tumblr.com/)!


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